The purpose of this paper is to document the indirect effects of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan on professional school degrees awarded and to propose the far reach of the law as an alternative argument in support of race-conscious admissions policies challenged under the strict scrutiny standard. Designed around the two tests of strict scrutiny,…

Despite being academically unqualified for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, Abigail Fisher, a White female, argued that she was not admitted due to the university's diversity policy. In addition to framing postsecondary admissions as a zero-sum phenomenon, Ms. Fisher intentionally frames students of color who are admitted to the…

With a decision pending in two lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), many observers are predicting that the US Supreme Court will significantly limit, if not completely prohibit, the use of race in college and university admissions. However if the United…

Few studies have focused on the role of Asian Americans in influencing how race is understood in affirmative action debates. However, accounting for the complicating presence of Asian Americans in the racial politics of affirmative action has become increasingly important. Informed by racial formation theory, this critical discourse analysis of…

Previous policy analysis of the Top Ten Percent Plan (TTPP) has focused on the outcomes of the policy (e.g., Card & Krueger, 2005; Kain & O'Brien, 2004; Long, 2004), answering questions such as whether the TTPP led to increased or decreased access for particular groups. Absent from the literature is an analysis of the policy-change process…

What happens to race in public discussions about "race-neutral" college admissions policies? This article shows how race disappeared from elite political debate during hearings on Texas Senate Bill 175 (2009), the Top Ten Percent Plan (the Plan), which guaranteed college admissions to high school graduates from the top 10% of their…

It has been a long, litigious road from Heman Sweatt, an African-American mail carrier who wanted to attend the prestigious, all-White law school at the University of Texas at Austin in 1946, to Abigail Fisher, a White high school student who failed to win undergraduate admission to the same university a half-century later. Depending on what the…

We investigate the efficacy and equity of college admissions criteria by estimating the effect of multiple measures of college readiness on college performance in the context of race-blind automatic admissions policies. We take advantage of a unique institutional feature of the Texas higher education system to control for selection into…

The Supreme Court has granted review for the 2012 term in the case "Fisher v. University of Texas." Abigail Fisher, a rejected white applicant to the University of Texas, has challenged the use of racial and ethnic admission preferences, which the Court had allowed in its 2003 decision involving the University of Michigan law school,…

The author reports on the ruling of a divided appellate court that held that the state law unconstitutionally made it harder for minorities to seek preferences than for other groups. The court struck down a voter-passed ban on the use of race-conscious admissions by Michigan's public colleges, holding that the measure had unconstitutionally put…

The author reports on a Supreme Court case that is echoing across the University of Texas at Austin, and for some students, it is personal. Not long after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Abigail Fisher's case against the University of Texas at Austin, a lighthearted joke made the rounds at the Warfield Center for African and African-American…

This timely book examines issues pertaining to equal opportunity--affirmative action, challenges to it, and alternatives for improving opportunities for underrepresented groups--in higher education today. Its starting point is California's Proposition 209, which ended race-based affirmative action in public education and the workplace in 1996. The…

The responses of African American college students to the campus environment at a large Texas university were studied through interviews that focused on student adjustment to the college environment and the university's response to students of color. Many studies have documented that black students are affected by the perception of discrimination…

This paper describes the college admission process through the conceptual lens of Dickason's (2001) phases of affirmative action. The first phase, obligatory affirmative action, describes the history of affirmative action and the impact on college admission. The second phase, voluntary affirmative action, describes University of West Florida's…

This report discusses how to safeguard affirmative action on college campuses. Section 1, "Threats to Affirmative Action," discusses Congressional action; state actions; and anti-affirmative action studies and reports. Section 2, "Affirmative Action Works," includes research findings; leaders' beliefs about affirmative action…